fication meeting, and the polls! Who
taught him to exhort men to prepare for eternity, as for some future era
of which the present forms no integral part? The furrow which Time is
even now turning runs through the Everlasting, and in that must he plant
or nowhere. Yet he would fain believe and teach that we are _going_ to
have more of eternity than we have now. This _going_ of his is like that
of the auctioneer, on which _gone_ follows before we have made up our
minds to bid,--in which manner, not three months back, I lost an
excellent copy of Chappelow on Job. So it has come to pass that the
preacher, instead of being a living force, has faded into an emblematic
figure at christenings, weddings, and funerals. Or, if he exercise any
other function, it is as keeper and feeder of certain theologic dogmas,
which, when occasion offers, he unkennels with a _staboy!_ 'to bark and
bite as 'tis their nature to,' whence that reproach of _odium
theologicum_ has arisen.

"Meanwhile, see what a pulpit the editor mounts daily, sometimes with a
congregation of fifty thousand within reach of his voice, and never so
much as a nodder, even, among them! And from what a Bible can he choose
his text,--a Bible which needs no translation, and which no priestcraft
can shut and clasp from the laity,--the open volume of the world, upon
which, with a pen of sunshine or destroying fire, the inspired Present
is even now writing the annals of God! Methinks the editor who should
understand his calling, and be equal thereto, would truly deserve that
title of {poimen laon}, which Homer bestows upon princes. He would be
the Moses of our nineteenth century; and whereas the old Sinai, silent
now, is but a common mountain, stared at by the elegant tourist and
crawled over by the hammering geologist, he must find his tables of the
new law here among factories and cities in this Wilderness of Sin
(Numbers xxxiii. 12) called Progress of Civilization, and be the captain
of our Exodus into the Canaan of a truer social order.

"Nevertheless, our editor will not come so far within even the shadow of
Sinai as Mahomet did, but chooses rather to construe Moses by Joe Smith.
He takes up the crook, not that the sheep may be fed, but that he may
never want a warm woollen suit and a joint of mutton.

_Immemor, O, fidei, pecorumque oblite tuorum!_

For which reason I would derive the name _editor_ not so much from
_edo_, to publish, as from _edo_, to eat, that be